Don't you like music? Franz asked.
No, said Sabina, and then added, though in a different era... She was
thinking of the days of Johann Sebastian Bach, when music was like a rose
blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence.
Noise masked as music had pursued her since early child-hood. During her
years at the Academy of Fine Arts, students had been required to spend
whole summer vacations at a youth camp. They lived in common quarters
and worked together on a steelworks construction site. Music roared out of
loudspeakers on the site from five in the morning to nine at night. She felt
like crying, but the music was cheerful, and there was nowhere to hide, not
in the latrine or under the bedclothes: everything was in range of the
speakers. The music was like a pack of hounds that had been sicked on her.
At the time, she had thought that only in the Communist world could such
musical barbarism reign supreme. Abroad, she discovered that the
transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which
mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness. The total
ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent acoustical
ugliness: cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens. The
omnipres-ence of visual ugliness would soon follow.
After dinner, they went upstairs to their room and made love, and as Franz
fell asleep his thoughts began to lose coher-ence. He recalled the noisy
music at dinner and said to himself, Noise has one advantage. It drowns out
words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but
talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend
them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated,
their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through
his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness. And what
he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was
unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing,
over-powering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the
futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music
was the anti-word! He yearned for one long embrace with Sabina, yearned
never to say another sentence, another word, to let his orgasm fuse with the